Conventional rotary cutting systems has been employed to cut product webs employed to produce personal care absorbent articles. Typical cutting systems have included rotary knife rolls and cooperating, rotary anvil rolls. The knife rolls have been configured to provide an array of cutting dies to provide cutting lines arranged with selected shapes. Other conventional cutting systems have included bonding components for providing crimps or other construction bonds. In particular systems, the construction bonds have been located adjacent the regions of product webs where the product webs have been cut.
In conventional cutting systems the cutting knives have been susceptible to excessive wear and have required excessive maintenance. To address these problems, conventional cutting systems have employed knives which can selectively move and retract away from a cutting surface to reduce the wear and degradation of the cutting edges of the knives. The retractable or otherwise moveable knife systems, however, have been susceptible to binding or clogging caused by troublesome accumulations of stray particles of cut material.
To help maintain the reliability of the bonding and cutting of the product web, conventional manufacturing systems have employed separate equipment modules to perform the bonding and cutting operations. With such conventional systems, the bonding operation has typically been performed prior to the cutting operation. The separate processing modules, however, have contributed to increased complexity and cost, and have required increased amounts of space.
It has been desirable to provide the cutting and bonding operations in a single, combined equipment module. Conventional systems and techniques for providing the combined cutting and bonding operations, however, have not been sufficiently reliable. The bonding and cutting of the product web have not been sufficiently consistent, particularly when conducted at high manufacturing speeds. Additionally, the employed cutting knives have been susceptible to excessive wear, and the equipment has required excessive maintenance.
As a result, there has been a continuing need for a more compact method and apparatus that can provide a combined bonding and cutting operation with increased reliability, increased efficiency and lower cost. Additionally, there has been a continuing need for an improved method and apparatus for reliably cutting a product web at high speeds while avoiding excessive wear of the cutting knives and avoiding excessive maintenance costs.